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Labor unrest and civil violence in the late nineteenth century, coupled with a so-called flood of new immigrants (many of whom were neither Protestant nor English-speaking), created a distinct uneasiness, even alarm, among middle- and upper-class Americans who increasingly saw their cities as sites of foreign invasion and insidious danger. Though poverty, disease, interclass tension, and the presence of "foreigners" were hardly new phenomena in American cities, there was the perception of a growing urban crisis that served as a specter of more general civic disintegration. Among the foremost definers and publicists of this crisis was Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, journalist, photographer, and urban reformer who spent several years chronicling the conditions of New York's slums. Riis's lantern-slide lectures and immensely popular writings served not only to heighten his audience's concern for the plight of the poor, but also to frighten and titillate them with images of a morally questionable and demographically ascendant "other half."
Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), which went through eleven editions in the span of five years, used visual images (both drawings and photographs), statistics on mortality, overcrowding, and disease, and dramatically told anecdotes of individual immigrants' hardships to relay its message of advancing urban decay (Szasz and Bogardus 422). In a letter to Riis, James Russell Lowell attests to the book's influence:
I have read your book with a deep and painful interest.... I had but a vague idea of these horrors before you brought them so feelingly home to me. I cannot conceive how such a book should fail of doing great good, if it moves other people as it has moved me. I found it hard to get asleep the night after I had been reading it. (Rpt. in Riis, MA 308)
Riis's magazine articles, lectures, and other books had similarly potent effects.1 His ability to cause insomnia among the comfortable classes owes a great deal to the sensationalism of both his methods and his language. As a photographer, Riis captured what was usually hidden from public view-squalid rooms, back alleys, flophouses, "dives," and cellars-occasionally catching his subjects asleep, with their shoes off, even with their pants unbuttoned.2 Segments of his texts read like a "you are there" travelogue, guiding the reader along dark, fetid...